And when he murdered Vlad, Stan thought the KGB had thrown the rulebook out the window first, and declared open season on FBI agents.

I'm not sure. Philip and Elizabeth are very good at impersonation, killing people, and stealing stuff. But they and their organization aren't great at gathering intelligence. They're continually boxing at shadows, acquiring assets that don't pan out (or actively bite back), and developing compelling but wrong…

Fair enough. Crazy theory is crazy.

Though ruthlessness aside, the real-world plan had a means of ensuring the compromised tech would get to the Soviets (feeding it to them, presumably via double or suborned agents or known channels), rather than putting them somewhere and hoping invisible superspies would succeed in burgling them.

Prez for Prez!

Probably not. But it probably deserves a more prominent place in the history of the war than it tends to get. (Though of course every country focuses disproportionately on its own experience.)

See above: "(popularized in "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail" and "The Da Vinci Code")" :-)

IIRC, in his letters, JRRT said it was pronounced "Toll-KEEN".

I can imagine Stan knowing they're agents without knowing the full extent of what goes on on their missions. He'd certainly be responsible for the results not closing the net right away (and probably feel bad about it), but presumably it would be with an eye towards rolling up the whole Directorate S network.

Is there anything preventing his wife from going home?

Did the CIA actually use CAD to design a submarine propeller assembly with undetectable flaws that would cause it to fail catastrophically and take down any vessel equipped with it. . . and then intentionally leave those plans where Russian operatives could conveniently steal them?

"Boat people" was generally used sympathetically: the image was of desperate people taking to overcrowded boats (many never meant for passengers) to escape the horrors of the incoming regime. It could become an epithet when used by people who didn't like them, just like anything can, but it wasn't broadly a negative…

It's not necessarily useless. At ground zero or nearby nothing's going to save you. But beyond a certain radius (and even a total nuclear exchange doesn't cover every square inch of the country, still less with the much smaller number of nukes back when civil defense drills were popular), the major danger are things…

The Holodomor didn't come up a lot in the mainstream US press in the 60s to the 80s. (For that matter, it doesn't much now, compared to atrocities by its contemporary totalitarians.) Even Western scholars tended to underestimate its impact till the 80s.

The US government has done plenty of terrible things, but murdering ten million-odd citizens isn't one of them. It would be in all the papers.

Or "well, this standard says grade B wheat can have 20% random crud, and this only has 13%; if I add another 7%, I can sell that many more pounds at the agreed price without putting in any more wheat!"

Heck, their next door neighbor and best friend is an FBI agent!

His father was arrested by the regime and prevented from seeing his family. And a country in which you "have it fine" doesn't generally have to restrict emigration to stop you from leaving (so if you want to leave, you can discuss it with your family without risking not being allowed to go).

P&E aren't soldiers, and if they were, they'd be war criminals. They routinely commit first degree murder of innocent noncombatants. They are interesting, well-rounded characters who volunteered (rather than being compelled) to do horrible things in a bad cause.

It'll never happen, and I doubt that it's consistent with what we've seen of the FBI side. But it would be kind of awesome if it turns out that Stan's actually twigged to P&E with Henry's help (witting or otherwise), and is playing them the way they think they're playing him. (With Stan's overenthusiasm for keeping…